Contents

In 1992, Scott Ross left Industrial Light and Magic and formed his own computer effects house, Digital Domain. One of Ross's cofounders was director James Cameron, and the company would go on to make its name on Cameron pictures like True Lies and Titanic.

Why did you leave ILM?

I felt strongly that the kind of thing George Lucas had built in Northern California lent itself to being a real production studio. He had all of the tools and, clearly, some of the best people in the industry. And in my opinion, it could have been, and should have been, what Pixar became: a creative force not tied to one man's output, but a place where multiple folks could create stories and make films using some of the most interesting technology in the world. The whole nine yardslive action as well as animation.

The ideal model is Pixar. Films funded by a studio that not only does distribution and marketing but is also the production company, that has the creative people who come up with the stories as well as the technology and the factory needed to produce a finished product. Then they have licensed distributors who go out and sell that product.

But at this point, isn't Digital Domain just a digital-effects house?

Well, the visual-effects business is a very difficult business. (And some people say it's not a business at all!) In some ways, the most interesting images put on the screen today come from visual-effects companies. You can see it in a trailer, where they're basically the whole trailer. A good example is The Day After Tomorrow. I don't recall much of what happens in that trailer except for New York being flooded and frozen over and L.A. being ripped apart by tornadoes. Visual effects are really critical to the marketing and sale of tickets.

Yet, with all of that, the visual-effects community is still a people-for-hire, service-based business. It's a very high-cost business, mostly in terms of personnel. Equipment costs have come down considerably, but the price of people has gone up even more considerably.

As a result of that, you have very high costs, so the studios and the directors who are buying your services are blown away by the amount of money you charge. But there's no markup. You're not making any money. What happens is that money flows from the studio to the visual-effects company and then from the visual-effects company to the people working for it. There's very little money left over for profit and overhead.

Now, some people have broken that cycle in a very significant way, Pixar being one, Blue Sky Studios [[the makers of animated CGI features including Ice Age and Robots]] being another, and PDI [[the CGI company purchased by DreamWorks]] being the third. They've really been able to take off.

What's the common denominator? They all use CGI to make animated features, no?

The common denominator is money. With Pixar, the money came from Disney. [[Disney has teamed with Pixar for many years and actually bought the studio earlier this year.]] With PDI, the money came from DreamWorks. And with Blue Sky, the money came from Fox.

But aren't some people making money just doing special effects?

As we look back over the 15 years of computer graphics and visual effects, we can see only a handful of companies that have been able to keep their doors open, pay their people, and still be in business. ILM is an obvious one, because they've had a sugar daddythe guy who makes Star Wars. When I was there, it wasn't like George was coming in and writing checks, but he was bringing large quantities of work to the facility. If the facility always knows that a fair amount of work is flowing in, you can actually make some money. But if you're in the position where you don't know because you're out there selling with the rest of them, competing with the rest of them, and you don't know what's going to happen in 8 months. ILM knows what's going to happen.

Outside of ILM, which are the market's leading houses?

Sony Pictures Imageworks, Rhythm and Hues, Weta, and us.

Digital Domain is based in Southern California, but you originally started in Northern California with ILM. Did you consider opening in the Bay Area or somewhere other than Hollywood? With today's high-speed networks, it seems like it'd be easy to open an effects house wherever you like.

When I was starting Digital Domain, I was thinking of starting it in Northern California, because I was at ILM and the people that were going to join me were all ILMers. But it became obvious to me that if I was going to do business in the film industry, and since I wasn't George Lucas and didn't have a George Lucas on my side at the time, I couldn't start in Northern California. We had to be in L.A.

If you look at most of the big, award-winning facilities and the companies that are doing cutting-edge work, many of them are outside the Hollywood area as the result of a very influential founder being an alien. The reason Weta [[Peter Jackson's effects house]] is in New Zealand is because Peter Jackson is a Kiwi. A majority of the staff on the first two Lord of the Rings pictures were Americans, who were being paid more than they were being paid working in America.

Why is the personnel so expensive?

There's a limited pool of talent that's available, and more and more need for the product has arisen. It's supply-and-demand economics.

How many effects artists does Digital Domain employ?

About 500.

What sort of hardware do you use?

We build it ourselves. It's not off the shelf, but nothing is proprietary. We're all Intel-based. We used to be SGI-based, of course.

There must be many advantages to using commodity hardware rather than SGI.

It's freed us up immeasurably. It's hard to even quantify. We were stuck to a company that . . . well, they didn't care. They didn't have to. They had cornered the marketplace. It's the exact opposite of what our economic system is based on. They had a monopoly.

I remember the day I decided to switch to the Intel architecture from SGI. This was about three years after my company started. I read an article that a friend of mine, Carl Rosendahl, who used to run PDI, had written in Wired magazine. Basically, he said, "I don't understand this. If you look at Intel and IBM"and he listed three or four other non-SGI companies"and you add up their R&D budgets, it dwarfs the revenues of SGI on a worldwide basis by, like, a hundredfoldjust their R&D efforts. If you believe in the future of computer-generated imagery, it's only a matter of time before this tiny little company gets gobbled up by the big players out there." A light bulb went off over my head.

How about speed? Are you able to do things faster nowadays?

Actually, it takes us the same amount of time, but we do more complex things. We're always coming up with new things. Our clients are never coming in and saying, "What I really want is that effect that you did on Star Trek 10 years ago." Of course, there are companies that do it fast and cheap, but we do the new stuff.

And software?

About 70 percent off-the-shelf, 30 percent home-brewed. One piece of software we wrote, called Nuke, is now available on the open market. It's for compositing. Weta is using it. In London, Cinesite [the company behind V for Vendetta] is using it.

How many programmers do you have on staff?

About 20.

And what off-the-shelf packages do you use?

Houdini, Maya, and LightWave 3D, mostly.

Are there still big limitations in today's hardware and software?

As I see it, they're fast enough and powerful enough . . . but probably in a week, I'll say we need more processing power. I think there are limitations in terms of user interfaces. I see that as a big challenge. There are some limitations on the ability to see high-resolution playback for longer periods of time on the artist's workstation.

But you know, all of the stuff we see today is enhanced because of the artistry of the person behind the computer, not limited by the computer's FLOPs. I think we've gone past that threshold. It's no longer about the hardware, it's a lot less about the software, and it's a lot about who's driving the bus.

Do you care if a movie you're working on is shot digitallyas opposed to on film?

It makes a difference. If it's shot on film, we have to do analog-to-digital conversions; we have to scan all the film. We still do a lot of scanning, though nowadays that's starting to change. Films are looking at finishing in a "digital intermediate" format, so the actual film is scanned no matter what. Other houses are specifically set up to scan and "color-time." Then after our work is done, the movie goes back out to celluloid. So a lot of times it's already in the digital domain by the time we get it. Nowadays, most movies are digitized, and you can manipulate the raw data and change it to your heart's content.

Color timing is a way of adjusting a movie's colors to the cinematographer's liking?

In the old days, in the optical format, you had wedges where you'd take the film and you'd put it in certain chemicals and do certain exposures to get a look before you printed for distribution. Nowadays, you can manipulate colors using various software tools that emulate color timing in the lab, but with infinite possibilitiesand much more repeatable possibilities. You can do it on a frame-by-frame basis (if you're that crazy) or scene-by-scene, manipulating color so that ultimately, when the film comes out and you make an analog print, it's color-timed exactly the way the director of photography wants the film to look.

Are there drawbacks to leaning so heavily on digital effects?

The downside to this technology is that it's become anarchistic. Everything is "Fix it in post." Whatever one wants, one can have. If you're a powerful filmmaker with unlimited access to money, you can make a dinosaur chase that looks like garbage and lasts 10 minutes longer than it shouldlike Sir Edmund Hillary said, because you can. And that's a real problem. When people can do things, oftentimes they will and they shouldn't.

King Kong won the Academy Award [for visual effects]. There are certain CGI segments in Kong that are just awesome, where even I was blown away. Kong exhibited so much emotion you felt for him, you cared about him, you loved himall the things a character should make you do. But when he got up and moved around, he looked like a bad guy in a puppet suit. And when they were running down that dinosaur trench, it looked liked 1950s special effects. It took you right out of the movie. That's a big problem with a lot of special-effects movies. Some of the work is jaw-droppingly good, some of the work is horrible.

The sequences where we're watching through the windows in the Star Wars prequel and there are all of these spacecraft moving in the background? I remember reading an interview with George where he said, "Well, that's the way it would look." I don't care if that's the way it would look. It's a movie, and when you've got all that stuff flying around in the background, I'm not paying attention to what's happening in the foregroundand the movie is what's happening in the foreground. If I was in that room and I was listening to the Emperor, I wouldn't see the rockets in the background. My attention would be on the Emperor. As a filmmaker you have to learn how to point the camera in the right direction, focus in the right way, use all the cinematic tools available to you so the viewer focuses on the things he should be focused on.

How will the digital-effects business change in the years to come?

There will be huge changes in the way we do things. The costs are too high. The people are too expensive. I think that as we're seeing films with 800 to 1,000 to 2,000 effects shotswhich was unheard of back in the day a big movie was 200 shotswhere most of the movie is now CGI and visual effects, you'll have to set up a hub-and-spoke environment. You won't be able to do it all in one place. The Chronicles of Narnia was handled by three houses: ILM, Rhythm and Hues, and Sony Pictures Imageworks.

Right now, everybody's talking about the globalization of effects, and there's a real push to bring visual effects work to China and India because their cost of living is considerably less than ours. And that's going to work if they understand how to do it, which is very complex, if they bring in key creative people to teach the folks who are there, who haven't been to war, what it's like to be at war. And then they're going to have a small window of opportunitythat's probably going to be about three years.

Today, in Mumbai, you could do the kind of work that Digital Domain does at 50 cents on the dollar. You couldn't do it at the quality level that we do it at, but if it's a B or C movie, you might be able to do it. You do it at 50 cents on the dollar, but you charge the client 70 cents on the dollar and now you're making some money. But it won't last. Because other people are building facilities, and all of the sudden there's going to be a guy who says, "I can do it for 50 cents on the dollar," and pretty soon it's 40 cents and you're losing money. And then the market goes to China.

The lowest common denominator is the wage of the earner. If you can get the earner's wage down, you'll have a period of time where you can actually make money. But that will catch up with you very quickly, because of supply-and-demand economics.

But you can't reproduce [Hollywood effects] in those places right now. To really reproduce it, you need people who know how to do it, people that have done it, and the project that lets you do it. Plus, management that's able to manage you through it.

Automatic Renewal Program: Your subscription will continue without interruption for as long as you wish, unless
you instruct us otherwise. Your subscription will automatically renew at the end of the term unless you authorize
cancellation. Each year, you'll receive a notice and you authorize that your credit/debit card will be charged the
annual subscription rate(s). You may cancel at any time during your subscription and receive a full refund on all
unsent issues. If your credit/debit card or other billing method can not be charged, we will bill you directly instead. Contact Customer Service